Petula Clark and Fred Astaire Head Cast:2 Other Movies Begin Local Engagements

By RENATA ADLER

Published: October 10, 1968

THERE is something awfully depressing about seeing "Finian's Rainbow" this year this way—with Fred Astaire looking ancient, far beyond his years, collapsed and red-eyed; with film work so shoddy that the camera hardly ever includes his feet when he dances and that people who have been sopping wet in one cut are absent-mindedly dry in the next; with nobody even bothering to put the whole cheesy, joyless thing, which is in execrable color — Technicolor, wide-screen Panavision — into synch. Voices, Petula Clark's, Astaire's, Tommy Steele's, come from everywhere and nowhere, sometimes catching up with lips, sometimes floating in the general parallax that sitting near the sides of the Penthouse Theater (where the movie opened yesterday) brings on.

"How Are Things in Glocca Morra?", "If This Isn't Love," "Old Devil Moon," "Look to the Rainbow"—the magic, even the last bit of charm has gone out of them. It is not just that the musical is dated. Something lovely and nostalgic could have been made out of old Missitucky for the generation that grew up on "Finian's Rainbow" and "Brigadoon." It is that it has been done listlessly and even tastelessly, with quick updatings of Negro personalities to match what people who have lived in Beverly Hills too long must imagine modern black sensibilities are. The cast is full of children who act as artificially and insincerely as the whole enterprise, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, would suggest.

There is a nice appearance by Don Francks, as a romantic lead with a good smile around his mouth and nose; and Petula Clark, we know from a record or two, can sing. But the whole story of the Irishman who buries his gold and the white Southern senator who turns black has just gone dim, as though nobody had troubled with it—hoping only to sell it to television as a family musical and get it over with.